Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

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Whenever my mother and I cook together, she tells me her dreams. So rich and intense is Mom’s dream life, she’s given to cataloging and historicizing it: brooding black-and-white visions from her Stalinist childhood; sleek cold war thrillers laced with KGB spooks; melodramas starring duty-crushed lovers.

In a nod, I suppose, to her Iron Curtain past, Mother gets trapped in a lot of her dreams—although now, at seventy-nine years of age and after nearly four American decades, she tends to get trapped in pretty cool places. Deep, for example, in a mazelike, art-filled palace, one much resembling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, having retired as a schoolteacher, she works as a docent. In this dream’s Technicolor finale, an orange balloon rescues Mom from her labyrinth and deposits her at the museum’s sumptuous café. Whereupon she gorges on cream puffs.

But it’s one dream of hers from long ago, one I remember her telling me of many times, that’s most emblematic. Here she is, skinny, short-haired, tiptoeing into my bedroom as I awake to the hopeless darkness of a Soviet socialist winter. We’re in our minuscule flat in a shoddy Khrushchev-issue stained-concrete prefab on the outskirts of Moscow. It’s 1968; I am five. Soviet tanks have just rolled into Prague, my dad has abandoned us recently, and we’ve moved here from a Kafka-esque communal apartment near the Kremlin where eighteen families shared one kitchen. Mom, in her robe with faded blue cornflowers, sits on my bed, presses a reassuring kiss to my forehead. But in her eyes I see such toska (that peculiarly Russian ache of the soul), such desperate longing, I know right away she’s been visited once more by that dream.

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